Engleby

Sebastian Faulks

My views of Engleby, published in 2007, and of Sebastian Faulks are more fully stated in my Notes on his Birdsong, the novel for which he is best known.  As stated there, Faulks’ dialogue often seems awkward and affected; he needs to have a playwright edit his novels.  His grammar is marred by prepositional endings, run-on sentences, etc., and his characters do and say improbable things.  The plot here, a mystery, is more interesting than Birdsong’s, but not sufficiently to justify reading it.  Sebastian Faulks is living proof that mediocrity pays.  He was a journalist for 14 years, until he began writing novels fulltime, and he now has ten to his credit.  He is enormously successful and lives in London with his wife and two children.